My apartment complex is already full of the Christmas spirit. Wreaths are tacked up on wooden doors, windows contain strands of bright and colorful lights, and there's even a few nearly decorated coniferous evergreens peaking out of some of the lightly glazed glass panes. But me… I'm not doing the Christmas tree tradition this year. Not enough room. I don't even want to go with a mini-tree. But I still want something to replace it, and I figured… why not origami?

I came across this video on YouTube from user Sara Adams, which demonstrates how to fold an origami fir tree by Flickr user Francesco Guarnieri. I think I found my new Christmas tree tradition. When unattached, the layers of green are octogram star polygons which look like they're formed of three triangles, but could also be two near squares.

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It's super small compared to a real Christmas tree, but I'm thinking about making a few of these…. Maybe a forest of them, and maybe with miniature ornaments attached. The tree version in the video above requires the following paper:

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I just watched Between the Folds, an origami documentary last night, which showed a fascinating range of organically formed origami, as well as origami more clearly related/rooted in math (much like the work we've been showing off here). It was interesting to see that even much of the organic, softer forms were created by sketching out plans using math. Math truly is the root of it all (well 95% of it). I'll post the trailer to the corkboard. I highly recommend it... it's available instant through Netflix, and you can rent it on iTunes as well.

Cool. I might have to make some of these. It seems like with these crease patterns that they should be very collapsible and so you can change the angles of the branches quite a bit by "squeezing them down"